Biomarkers' Role in Reducing Drug Development Time and Costs to Boost the European Biomarker Analysis Market, Notes Frost & Sullivan

LONDON, Feb. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Biomarker analysis market has excellent growth potential. The 'omics' revolution of the last decade has ensured that the field of biomarker research will test the frontiers of biomedical research in the coming years. Biomarkers have a multitude of applications such as early disease detection, identifying potential drug targets, predicting patient response to medication and accelerating clinical trials. Along with its role in making personalised medicine a reality, this technology enjoys priority in terms of funding and investments. The promise of biomarkers to shorten drug development time and decrease costs in the long-term is likely to act in tandem to spur growth in the biomarker analysis market.

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New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.drugdiscovery.frost.com), European Biomarker Analysis Market, finds that market earned revenues of $694.00 million in 2008 and estimates this to reach $2202.00 million in 2015. This is an early growth stage market with significant potential. The applications covered in this research are genomics, proteomics and metabolomics.

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Although biomarker testing in itself is inexpensive, the process of biomarker discovery and assay development is costly. There is a lag between the discovery of biomarkers in the laboratory and commercialisation, due to major roadblocks in biomarker validation and assay development. Target validation, high-throughput compound screening and lead discovery are processes that take place as a separate workflow whereas biomarker discovery, assay development and much later testing, are a parallel workflow. The union between these two workflows is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for biomarker testing to go mainstream. Since the costs involved with managing two parallel workflows for one drug development programme are high, only the pharmaceutical leviathans with the needed financial backing can successfully implement this model.

"Currently, biomarker testing is sporadic and mainly restricted to large biotech and pharma companies," explains Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Rasika Ramachandran. "Although the regulators are gradually mandating biomarker testing for widespread adoption by all tiers of biotech and pharma companies, most pharma companies need to find a way to converge the drug development workflow with the biomarker development workflow to facilitate cost-effective and accessible biomarker testing."

The integration of the workflows is happening, albeit at a slow pace. A workable solution is expected to be reached by the pharmaceutical industry in the next five or more years to come.

For now, cancer biomarkers and cardiovascular biomarkers have been found to have the greatest growth among the disease areas. Central nervous system (CNS) biomarkers are also not far behind and have been found to have excellent growth potential mainly due to the tremendous thrust in Alzheimer's biomarker research.

The biomarker analysis market is set to grow exponentially for most of the next seven years except in the short-term where growth rates have been predicted with caution and conservativeness to factor in any reduction in growth due to the on-going financial slowdown.

In order to get a quicker return-on-investment, all the benefactors of biomarker discovery and development should share development costs as the resulting biomarker will be beneficial to all involved. This can help to lower the biomarker development costs significantly and make it more accessible to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.

"Although the task of uniting the entire industry towards this cause is a formidable one, at present this seems to be the only solution to the challenge of making biomarker testing reach every drug discovery lab," concludes Ramachandran. "The long-term benefits of such an undertaking will help in justifying the efforts that are involved in making it happen."

European Biomarker Analysis Market is part of the Drug Discovery & Clinical Diagnostics Growth Partnership Service programme, which also includes research in the following markets: European Lab-on-chip and Microfluidics Market and European Two Dimensional Electrophoresis Market. All research services included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends that have been evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants.

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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan